Standing on the surface of Venus, your body would be crushed by the immense pressure, fried by the lead-melting heat, and dissolved by sulfuric acid thunderstorms. Too bad, because if you could survive on Venus, you might witness some epic volcanic eruptions.

From filmmaker Marc Szeglat comes this video of a "lava art craft worker" scrambling his way up a lava flow on Italy's Mount Etna, one of the most active volcanos on Earth. The flow is literally glowing with heat, which makes this craft worker literally an idiot.

A recent paper published in Nature Geoscience has proposed the existence of an entirely new kind of volcanic eruption, which geologists are now calling a 'tangaroan' eruption. Rather than being either explosive or effusive, this newly documented type of eruption involves the slow release of magma that generates a…

Geologists and paleontologists have been kicking around an idea for the past several decades which threatens to overturn the scientific canon surrounding the demise of the dinosaurs. Rather than an asteroid impact, say a growing number of researchers, it was extreme volcanic activity that drove the dinosaurs to…

Peter Jackson relied on two volcanoes to serve as stand-ins for Mount Doom, Tolkein's fiery mountain of fate, while filming The Lord of the Rings: New Zealand's Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Ruapehu. Now, geologists are warning locals that the latter may be at risk of erupting.

When I read that the video featured here was intense, I was skeptical. One of my biggest gripes about "reality" television programs (and, to a lesser extent, documentaries) is how they often use music and stylized camerawork to imbue relatively innocuous situations with a sense of urgency, tension or danger (see:…